Voyage ends for jazz piano giant Dave Brubeck

The Lowell Sun

Updated:
12/06/2012 07:14:32 AM EST

By Richard Scheinin

Mercury News

To see pianist Dave Brubeck in recent years -- up on stage, say, at the Monterey Jazz Festival, striding with his band through "Take Five," his seminal tune -- one might have thought he would play forever. That thick shock of white hair. That electric smile. Those sturdy fingers on the keys.

But Brubeck, one of the legends of jazz and American music, generally, died Wednesday in Connecticut, one day short of his 92nd birthday. He was on his way to a doctor's appointment with his son, Darius, also a musician. And so ended the life of this musical voyager, who was born in Concord, Calif., grew up the son of an East Bay cattle rancher, took piano lessons from his mother, and went on to become the composer of jazz standards, ballet music and oratorios, active until a fine old age. He was a legend, on the cover of Time magazine in 1954, the recipient of many honors, including the National Medal of Arts in 1994.

Brubeck studied at the College of the Pacific (now the University of the Pacific) in Stockton. He originally planned to be a veterinarian -- he couldn't read music at the time -- but eventually followed his heart to conservatory studies. He graduated in 1942, served overseas in George Patton's Third Army, formed his own popular band while in the Army, and wound up at Mills College in Oakland. There he studied under the jazz-infatuated French composer Darius Milhaud.

Over the years, Brubeck became famous for incorporating complex rhythms and harmonies into his tunes.

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His goals were to were "to play polytonally and polyrhythmically," he once said. After founding his Dave Brubeck Quartet with alto saxophonist Paul Desmond in 1951, he followed through with hits that achieved that goal: "Take Five" is in 5/4 rhythm, "Blue Rondo a la Turk," loosely based on a Mozart theme, is in 9/8.

But that makes his music sound academic. Truth was, it was accessible. His were popular tunes, played on jukeboxes around the country. Brubeck believed in jazz that worked on a variety of levels: musicians could argue about poly this and poly that; listeners --and Brubeck himself -- would be busy tapping their feet to the rhythm of his hit tunes.

The Brubeck quartet's "Jazz at Oberlin," recorded live at Oberlin College, climbed the charts and the group toured the globe. When he was honored by Time with that cover story a few years later, it made him the second jazz musician to be so honored; Duke Ellington was the first in 1949. The honor reportedly embarrassed Brubeck, who considered Ellington a greater musician than himself, and he was said to believe that the honor was due to his being white.

In 1988, he played for Mikhail Gorbachev, at a dinner in Moscow that then-President Ronald Reagan hosted for the Soviet leader.

"I can't understand Russian, but I can understand body language," said Brubeck, after seeing the general secretary tapping his foot.

In the late 1980s, Brubeck contributed music for one episode of an eight-part series of television specials, "This Is America, Charlie Brown." His music was for the episode involving NASA and the space station. He worked with three of his sons -- Chris on bass trombone and electric bass, Dan on drums and Matthew on cello -- and included excerpts from his Mass "To Hope! A Celebration," his oratorio "A Light in the Wilderness," and a piece he had composed but never recorded, "Quiet As the Moon."

"That's the beauty of music," he told the AP in 1992. "You can take a theme from a Bach sacred chorale and improvise. It doesn't make any difference where the theme comes from; the treatment of it can be jazz."

In 2006, the University of Notre Dame gave Brubeck its Laetare Medal, awarded each year to a Roman Catholic "whose genius has ennobled the arts and sciences, illustrated the ideals of the church and enriched the heritage of humanity."

At the age of 88, in 2009, Brubeck was still touring, in spite of a viral infection that threatened his heart and made him miss an April show at his alma mater, the University of the Pacific.

By June, though, he was playing in Chicago, where the Tribune critic wrote that "Brubeck was coaxing from the piano a high lyricism more typically encountered in the music of Chopin."

Despite his many honors, he remained a modest man to the very end. When I interviewed him in 2007 I asked him about how he felt about the Smithsonian Institution's giving him the formal title of "Living Legend."

"I'm always surprised," he said, "because I don't think of myself like that. You know, there are so many other people who would be more deserving."

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